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Infanticide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Robert Bluglass
Robert Bluglass*
Affiliation:
Midland Centre for Forensic Psychiatry, All Saints' Hospital, Birmingham B18 5SD
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Infanticide is a unique offence. The law decrees that the possession of a certain state of mind at the time that a recently delivered mother kills her child is sufficient to reduce her criminal responsibility for her actions. The law does not require evidence of a direct connection between the state of mind and the killing, and the consequences are not defined. She is to be dealt with as if she were guilty of the offence of manslaughter.

Type
College News
Information
Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists , Volume 2 , Issue 8 , August 1978 , pp. 139 - 141
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1978

References

(1) Report of the Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders. (Chairman: Lord Butler of Saffron Walden) (1975). Cmnd. 6244. H.M.S.O. Google Scholar
(2) H.M.S.O. Criminal Law Revision Committee (1976) Working Paper on Offences against the Person.Google Scholar
(3) Pugh, T. F., Jerath, B. K., Schmidt, W. M. & Reed, R. B. (1963) New England Journal of Medicine, 268, 1224.Google Scholar
(4) Pitt, B. (1968) Psychiatric illness in childbirth. Hospital Medicine, Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 815.Google Scholar
(5) d'Orbán, P. (1978) Personal communication; unpublished study.Google Scholar
(6) McGrath, P. G. (1978) Maternal filicide. Unpublished.Google Scholar
(7) Walker, N. (1968) Crime and Insanity in England. Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
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